On February 1, 2021, the military forces of Myanmar deposed the democratically elected members of the National League for Democracy, which had won 83% of the country’s parliamentary seats in the previous election. Protests erupted across the country in response to the coup, and what started out as peaceful resistance quickly turned violent as the junta worked to suppress the demonstrations. In this following essay and dispatch, Asymptote correspondent Lucas Stewart provides a delineation of what has happened in the year since, and examines the place of literature during such times of suppression. In conversations with Yu Ya, whose prolific writing career follows that of her father’s and uncle’s (both of whom were writers imprisoned under the former regime), this following piece puts a finger to human pulse of political unrest. Yu Ya’s quotations were co-translated by Stewart and Eaindra Ko Ko.
My balcony in Yangon had overlooked Sule Pagoda, an ancient stupa that once lay beyond the limits of the old city of Dagon, but now lights up the heart of Myanmar’s largest metropolis. From there, on the sixth day of the coup—a Saturday afternoon—we saw some of the first public outpourings of anger. Security forces, which had secured the City Hall opposite us and other strategic buildings in the early days of conflict, tumbled out; grey-uniformed, some with riot shields, those without a step behind them, they fanned from one side of the road to the other. An officer spoke into a radio, pointed one way north and then south and then back north again, before eventually settling on the east side of the pagoda, closest to the City Hall’s main entrance. There was a stand-off but no carnage that day, nor for the first two weeks. In that time, what had been a hundred protestors grew to hundreds of thousands, many coming from elsewhere, but always heading towards Sule Pagoda, the symbolic crux of protest. Some describe it like a carnival—which was true, I guess, at first. Music blasted out from overloaded speakers strapped to trucks. Sellers sold whatever, food, drink, National League for Democracy (NLD) merchandise. Volunteers picked up the debris left behind as the crowd moved on. Cars bashed their horns as they passed City Hall, knowing the soldiers within could hear their disgust. A neighbour, who remembered the midnight of 1988 when perhaps 300 or more protestors were shot at Sule Pagoda, told me this time if felt different. But that was in the early days.
Among the millions of people who woke up alongside me on February 1 to a blacked out and disconnected country was Yu Ya: prominent young short story writer, and friend of several years since we worked together on Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds, an anthology bringing short stories from Myanmar’s censored ethnic nationality languages to light for the first time. She later worked for BBC Media Action as a scriptwriter, contributing to inclusive, working-class voices radio programmes such as The Teacup Diaries.
Like many in Myanmar, she is no stranger to military coups, nor to the violence and oppression that follows the ascent to illegal power. Min Lu, Yu Ya’s father as well as a leading poet and author, was jailed in the aftermath of the 1988 revolution for penning ‘What’s Going On?’—a satirical, sarcastic poem attacking the then-illegal regime’s murders and maladministration. The poem witnessed a revival in the weeks following the 2021 coup. So now, what is going on in Myanmar?
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In the early hours of February 1, the Myanmar Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, overthrew Myanmar’s recently elected government—dominated by the National League for Democracy. Hundreds of NLD and other party lawmakers were arrested, including the nominal leader and State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Prominent activists, former political prisoners, and influential creatives were also rounded up. Following these events, protests across the nation erupted. Peaceful until the crackdown by military (and police), they haven’t stopped since. Over 11,500 civilians have been arrested, with 101 given death sentences. Nearly three quarters of a million are now internally displaced. Civilian armed groups—known as People Defense Forces and some allied with ethnic armed groups—have redirected the fight from urban areas to rural townships. The Generals have responded with hundreds of airstrikes, burning entire towns to the ground and committing just horrifying massacres. At least 1,500 people have died, though that figure is certainly a low confirmation, with some data collectors reporting over 12,500 deaths on both sides. Myanmar now ranks as the second least democratic nation in the world.
In their attempts to control this narrative, the illegal regime has made use of tactics old and new. Acutely aware of the power of social media to incite, inflame, and influence crimes against humanity, the senior generals fear the same platforms’ ability to rouse, resist, and retaliate. Shutting the internet down permanently across the nation is not a viable option, given the military’s need to communicate amongst themselves. Instead, security forces are seizing citizens’ phones and forcing access to social accounts. Those with anti-coup or pro-resistance tweets, posts, or blog shares are detained or simply shot.
In a telling sign that the new illegal regime is falling back on old, tired methods of manipulation and pathetic persuasion, they have already started to release printed collections of blame-defecting articles from the state-controlled Myanma Alinn and Kyemon newspapers. These type of books have a long history. In the 1988 revolution’s aftermath, the regime attempted to defend their atrocities through the prism of an alternative reality where it (the regime) had acted as a bastion of morality, peace, development, and all-round benevolence, achieving great things for the people it was crushing by accusing every organization and other despised countries of causing the sufferings that, confusingly, they also claimed to not exist. These books were printed by the state-owned News and Periodical Enterprise—now rebadged as the Printing and Publishing Enterprise—which own at least seven printing factories in Yangon and Mandalay, undercutting their independent publisher rivals through state subsidies. Though only available in the Burmese language so far, it is only a matter of time before these reinvented collections of mistruths, lies, and perversions will be available in English, published in titles similar to the 2002 book, Will tell all that is true . . . : a chest-thumping, diarrhetic paperback exposing the ‘craftiness’ and ‘tricky ways’ of how Thailand is to blame for, well, everything that was wrong in Myanmar.
The deliberate choice of words is important as it shows the direction, or at least the present location, of where the Generals and the People respectively see the fight for the future. In January this year, the English-language daily newspeak of the illegal regime, The Global New Light of Myanmar, began to resurrect the three-decades old Orwellian slogans spat across their printed material, whether it be the pre-colophon pages in novels, newspaper front pages, or billboards outside or opposite central buildings and road junctions: ‘Beware of internal and external destructive elements.’
Under previous military regimes, literature was censored before it went to print by a civilian team under the watchful eyes of a Grand Censor, a serving Military officer ultimately accountable to the Minister of Information. When the NLD’s minister, the short story writer and IWP fellow U Pe Myint, was detained on the first day of the coup, a particularly odious man happily slithered into his seat; a former Lieutenant-Colonel in the Burmese military, U Chit Naing had also held several positions within the previous junta’s propaganda outlets, including as Chief Editor of the Myawaddy Publishing House (literally owned and operated by the Burmese military) and Director General of the Information and Public Relations Department (IPRD)—the position responsible for which newspapers and books were to be made available to the information-starved public. His role as Vice Chair of the Myanmar Writers and Journalist Association (the only literary organization allowed to be legally formed until 2012) was defined by the credible accusations of having used his position to seek out potential pro-regime authors and rewarding them with prizes, titles, and publishing licences. After the coup, readers responded to his elevation by publicly burning his books in the streets of downtown Yangon. In an August cabinet reshuffle, U Chit Naing was promoted to the Ministry of the Office of the Union Government. If his successor as Minister of Information, Maung Maung Ohn (another former senior Army officer), continues this legacy, what would Yu Ya do? She is known for a particular style of writing, with anthropomorphic characters and blunt sentence structures, but would self-censoring her style, even under a new name, be a betrayal to who she is?
‘The most important thing for a writer is to stay true to their own writing. If you have to abandon that, what is the point of writing? You cannot separate the writing from the writer.’
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While the illegal regime is looking to past solutions for their current crimes, writers too are drawing on history to withstand the present, including Yu Ya:
Anyone who has lived through those years have similar memories of fear and disgust. Fear of what will happen and disgust at the illegal regimes which have created this fear. Saying that, not all the experiences are the same. For those who have suffered more in those years, the fear is not as prominent as their hatred. Take me as an example. I was only a child during the 1988–1990 revolution, but I remember when my father was taken away. At the time when I needed him, he wasn’t there. Because of them, my family suffered, financially, emotionally. Am I afraid? No. But this has nothing to do with me being a writer. It’s what I’ve known since I was a child. Hatred.
Yu Ya is not alone. Emotions have fuelled and drained us all over the last year. Writers both in and outside Myanmar have gone through a collective stage of rage, grief, and resilience. With the rage as the first impetus, four amazing women, Yu Ya among them, wrote the first short-fiction on the coup in March, which we published as ‘Flash the Coup’ in Adi Magazine.
Also in March, members of the Myanmar Poets Union took to the streets and read poems of protest from their phones and tablets; the video montage with English translations was uploaded to YouTube. In June, the Three Fingers Movements, a campaign founded by artists in Myanmar to creatively resist the illegal regime’s acts of inhumanity, led a month-long Twitter campaign calling for poetry that explored ‘hope, resistance, and solidarity’ for the people of Myanmar. Other poetry appeared internationally, mostly translated by the formidable ko ko thett in Mekong Review, Tripwire, and other platforms. Writing from beyond the centre, noted ethnic Chin writer Joel Ling, author of The Lonely Land and Mountain Rhododendron (possibly the first non-Burmese language novels translated into English), began his ‘Kalaymyo Diaries,’ documenting the illegal regime’s days-long assault on a civilian protest camp situated in a town close to the Indian border.
But then, a second collection of proposed stories for the month of August was set aside by the palpable grief of a nation, as the massacres kept coming but the words couldn’t. I asked Yu Ya then if fiction even had a place in this revolution any longer. She didn’t think so. ‘Now is not the right time. The stories are there, inside them, but right now writers are simply trying to stay alive.’ With the tragic murders of four poets: K Za Win, Ma Myint Myint Zin, Khet Thi, and U Sein Win, as well as the arrest and continued detention of so many more, the imploding economy, the weaponization of COVID-19, the burnings, global apathy, the exhaustion that seeps through as each month passes . . . But though the flowers are cut, the Spring still comes, and with it, a renewed literary resistance.
In August, a young ethnic Kachin writer and journalist, Seng Bru, founded an online arts, culture, and politics publication: the Kachin Literary Magazine, including pieces in Jinghpaw, Burmese, and English (including poetry by ko ko thett). Facebook is still the platform of choice for those who can access the internet in Myanmar, and Min Ko Naing—a prominent leader of the 1988 student-led revolution, poet, and author—still posts his poems despite being hunted by another dictator. As do so many others.
In October, San Mon Aung, an award-winning writer and publisher (among many other impressive roles), became the first Myanmar bookseller to showcase at the Frankfurt Book Fair, coordinating deals for the Danish translation of Pajau, a graphic novel depicting the true story of artist Htein Lin and the infamous executions within a student-formed armed group in the aftermath of the 1988 revolution. Also on offer was publisher Sayar Myo Myint Nyein’s translated memoir of his twelve-year imprisonment as a 1988 democracy activist, Resistance to Injustice, as well as writer and PEN International’s Writers in Prison committee chair, Ma Thida (Sanchaung)’s post-1988 prison and freedom memoir: Sanchaung, Insein, Harvard. At the present moment, however, there seems to be little further interest from the publishing world.
This is a problem. Despite the short-lived international attention garnered by the self-serving Irrawaddy Literary Festival—frantically out-chasing the looming clouds of censorship one sky at a time, Myanmar writers and publishers are still looking up and shouting to get the literal word out on those who witnessed and withstood and wrote from the previous revolution. With so little literature from Myanmar in English-translation, and with what is published so intertwined with past politics and revolutions and memoirs of struggle and conflict, I wanted to know who Yu Ya would advocate for. She replied humbly:
I don’t think it is my place to identify which writers should or should not be translated. Others in a better position can decide that. In general, though, any works published on the 2021 coup would be a good choice. That won’t happen right away, but it also won’t be long until we restore democracy in Myanmar. And when we do, those books should be read, so everyone can understand what has happened here.
However, books are reimagining this as a reckoning of eras; Picking off New Shoots will Not Stop the Spring was published in January 2022 by Ethos Press in Singapore (with concurrent releases in United Kingdom and United States by Balestier Press and Gaudy Boy). Edited by ko ko thett and Brian Haman, the anthology features poetry and essays by leading and emerging writers from across Myanmar, and is split through three defining epochs: the black-holed 1988 revolution, the Black Mirror-esque democracy transition from 2010, to the black-swan coup of February 1, 2021.
This is a critical book, not in it being the first to print a literary reaction to the coup in English translation, but in its reminder to the world’s literary community—international publishers, magazine editors, agents and gatekeepers to the English-reading sphere—of what you can do to give a voice to who most desperately need it. A second anthology, one of poetry bearing witness to the last twelve months, is also due to be published and distributed in Myanmar against all odds, and despite all the real dangers to those involved. Written in Burmese and translated into two languages including English, it too contains a corpus of writers from across revolutions, from ‘Student’ (1988) to ‘Saffron’ (2007) to ‘Spring’ (2021). Though it will be published anonymously, the weight of the past lies heavier on certain poets than others. As the daughter of a father who spent too many years imprisoned under two different dictators, I wondered if Yu Ya’s burden was to carry on where her father left off, to now resist a third with her own words.
‘What I do has nothing to do with what my father did before. If this is my cage now, I’m trying to break free from it because I am the one in it. Not him.’
Each generation of writers confronting the catastrophe that is their now, not what came before. And tomorrow? That future, that literature, so Yu Ya prophesises, is ‘like hot coals burning red—that which will only be visible once the ash that buries them has been removed.’
Image credit: Soe Ko Ko Aung
Lucas Stewart is a writer, editor, and Asymptote contributor for Myanmar. A former literature advisor to the British Council in Myanmar, he resided in the country for a decade before leaving in the months after the coup. His first non-fiction, The People Elsewhere: Unbound Journeys with the Storytellers of Myanmar (Penguin/Viking 2016) was shortlisted for the 2018 Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His essays, articles, and commentaries on literature from Myanmar have appeared in the Diplomat, the Asia Literary Review, Adi Magazine and other places. He is co-editor, with Alfred Birnbaum, of Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds: Contemporary Short Stories from Myanmar, (British Council, 2017). His own short stories have won the Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction, longlisted for the international Commonwealth Short Story Award, nominated for Best of the Net, and published in several places including twice anthologized by Comma Press. A co-founder of the Kachin: Uncivil War short story project, he is involved in several other projects to promote literature from Myanmar since the coup. Visit his website at www.sadaik.com.
Eaindra Ko Ko (a pseudonym) is a Burmese translator currently living in the United Kingdom.
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